What is BlogOut?
Following on Nexus 2007, The Digital Movement is taking one step further by having a gathering of various communities and pockets of bloggers to get to know each other! We at BlogDrive Templates acknowledges their efforts and want to allow these different communities to know each other, in particular, the smaller groups, and allow them to bond with each o ... (more)
For some time now, my friends and colleagues have been requesting the ability to add icons or links of social networking/bookmarking websites automatically with the appropriate Blog Title and Permalinks. John (JfZ) attempted something similar, though the focus was on tagging entries - another feature we've all been hoping Blogdrive would one day suppor ... (more)
As some of you may have already known, Google now allows you to add your website or Blog to thier new Sitemap programme and this may get your site better indexed with their service.
This would benefit you if you wants to get your blog indexed by Google, the most advanced search engine available. Google also allows you to monitor how well your blog is indexed by their service.
Here is a screenshot of what it looks like and you can catch a glimpse of what you are able to do with the data:
If you have a Google account, you can easily get started by logging in here and add your site. Here, I include a step by step instruction along with a Sitemap Generator I build just for Blogdrive blogs. See how much I care for you guys?
Once you are logged in the first thing you need to do is Add site.
Next, Verify your site. When prompt to "Choose verification method...", select "Add a META tag". You'll be given some codes that looks like this:
<META name="verify-v1" content="... ..." />
Insert these codes to the <head> section of your main template (Blog Admin --> Layout & Design --> Main Template Edit). Once this is done, you will be verified as the real blog owner and you can start managing your data.
The fun doesn't stop there, you can Add a Sitemap to this blog. Use this generator to generate the XML codes for your sitemap. blogurl refers to the your blog url, and pid refers to the total number of post you have created. To find out what your pid is, go to your blog and look at the last comment url, at the end of the url is a number.
Copy this code on to a text editor such as Notepad and save the file as "sitemap.jpg". Because the majority of you are using free accounts you aren't allowed to upload any files that aren't images. Hence instead of naming the document as "sitemap.xml" we save it as "sitemap.jpg".
Upload this file to your Blogdrive account under "File Manager". You'll get a URL like http://design.blogdrive.com/sitemap.jpg. Submit this to Google and you're done!
To let Google know of any future updates you have on your blog, you should add your RSS feed as another sitemap. Eg. http://design.blogdrive.com/index.xml This means you don't have to repeat all this process when you update your blog. Google will automatically collect information from your RSS feed.
Here are some additional details about this Sitemap Generator I made.
URLs excluded are tagboard, contact form and calendar archives. Please note that this sitemap only acts as a guide to Google's crawler and whether they follow it or not is entirely up to them. Sometimes they may index your blog daily despite setting it to weekly or monthly.